Check fraud costs customers hassle and financial institutions losses. Advances in counterfeiting technology have made it increasingly easy to create realistic counterfeit checks used to defraud banks and its customers and other businesses. Conventional methods of reducing check fraud include providing watermarks on the checks, fingerprinting non-customers that seek to cash checks, positive pay systems and reverse positive pay systems. Positive pay systems feature methods in which the bank and its customers work together to detect check fraud by identifying items presented for payment that the customers did not issue. With reverse positive pay systems, each bank customer maintains a list of checks issued and informs the bank which checks match its internal information. Although these check fraud security systems have been somewhat effective in deterring check fraud, they suffer from a multiplicity of drawbacks. For example, these systems are generally very slow and prohibitively expensive.